Watch Us Grow!

This is one of the first things I do in my class - wwwaaay back in September but I think it would a wonderful bulletin board for spring time too.

I take each child's photo on the first day and we ask them questions about themselves. We make a flower by putting blobs of paint on the paper, covering it with plastic wrap and squishing it. The results are amazing!

The poem reads -

I started in September
So cute and small,
And through the months
I’ve grown up so tall.
Look at my portraits
And you will see,
How much I’ve grown –
My pictures and ME!

This is always the first thing parents see when they walk into my classroom for our big art show. It makes the perfect end of the year gift for the parents too.

Spring Flowers

I just love springtime! My entire classroom is filled with even more happiness and activities. One of our favorite spring activities is making spring flowers.

I'm sure you can tell that we used our hand prints for the flower and our fingers for the seeds in the middle. But, can you tell that each student did their very own cutting?? All the stems were cut by the students themselves. Big accomplishment for newly-turned 4 year olds. This is a huge confidence builder!

"T" Week Comes to an End

After a very fun-filled week talking and working with the letter "T" we all celebrated with "T" Day! What an amazing day! We all wore our t-shirts and tennis shoes, made and ate a tree for snack, played great games and finally had a very special guest twirl her baton!

Let's start with those wonder trees that we made a snack time.

The bark of the tree was a 1/4 of a graham cracker and the top was 1/2 graham cracker topped with Mrs. Karen's homemade vanilla icing, colored green of course! We have discovered that it is more fun to just use our fingers to spread the icing. I loved hearing the students tell their parents that they "ate a tree today" when they were picked up.

We also played "T" games! First we played "Toss the Tops". Earlier in the week I had asked my fellow teachers to bring me any and all plastic bottle tops (WOW, I never expected to get so many!). My class had been using them all week playing sorting games. I took several garbage cans and buckets and everyone took turns trying to toss the tops. Simple game - lots of fun!

Next, I brought in my son's old batting tee (and I forgot that it was well used and very dirty but that seemed to be the "best" part). I knew that using a baseball wasn't going to be a good idea so we used a kick-ball instead. We are fortunate to have a very long hallway in the back of the school so we lined everyone up and took turns (I like to find anyway I can to practice sharing!). It was a bit HIT! :)

The finale of the day was my fellow teacher, Mrs. Amanda. It seems that she was a majorette in high school and she is an amazing baton "twirler". Oh my, you should have seen the faces of the children when Mrs. Amanda start twirling two then three batons!!! It was the perfect way to end "T" Day!

As you can imagine everyone left us smiling and very tired! Gotta love "T" day!

Outdoors

This week we have been studying the letter "T" and the great outdoors. I love this unit. We have a huge tent setup in our room, okay, it is really a king size sheet tacked to the wall but everyone loves it.

We also have made a few pretty cool bugs! I have a majority of boys in my room this year and my girls are too girlie, so we have a blast! Our first bug was a caterpillar made entirely with circles.

We picked out enough circles for a head and each letter of our name. Each students wrote their name, one letter on each circles and glued them all together to make a caterpillar. In the case of poor Mary Elizabeth, her caterpillar grew to great lengths. This is a huge hit with the parents!

Our next insect was made anatomically correct, three body parts, two eyes, two antennas, and six legs! But that is where the instructions stopped and the imagination begin. The cardboard egg cartons were painted any color the child wanted and then embellished with dots, stripes or in one case, flowers. The eyes on the insects like most of our eyes were made from 2 circle punches. It saves a great deal of money and the results are always fun.

"S" Week

My class voted and "S" week has been the most fun week yet. Okay, to be honest they say that about every week :) I did pull out all the fun stuff this week. We got to slide or skip down the hall all week. One day we actually slithered like snakes. That kinda got crazy but it was sssssssssssso fun.

Since I have 6 boys in my class I couldn't let "S" week go by without making some Silly Stick Snakes. On Monday we all picked out our sticks and painted them. I believe in giving my students a choice on things like this. I had a huge bag of sticks. Some where straight, long, fat, skinny, there was a big variety. I also let the students paint them in the color of their choice. I've never actually seen a blue or pink snake, but there were a lot of them in my class last week. We just used some scrap paper and two different paper punches for the eyes. I usually use red felt for the tongue but we were out so I have to use red scrap paper instead. Here are a few of our creations.

I had a crazy idea to do something with some straws but what? Then it hit me! We all went to the kitchen area and I grabbed 3 really large bowls. Lucky for me there were only 7 students there and it was all the good sharers. I filled the bowls half way with water and grabbed some dishwashing soap and gave each group a squirt. Here is where the fun started!!! Everyone started BLOWING! Oh my goodness! I have never seen so many bubbles and smiles in my entire life. The kitchen counter was filled with beautiful bubbles.

And as you know, if you have bubbles you mush POP them. So we started popping. What fun!

Since our alphabet lessons are winding down for the school year and we still have several more weeks of school left, I have decided to let my students vote for their favorite letter and we will "redo it". It should be interesting!

The Letter "R"

I love the letter "R"!! There are so many fun and interesting things to do and talk about that start with the letter "R". The very first thing we got to do on Monday morning was RUN! Yep, we actually got to RUN down the hall at school. Everyone loved it. It was a super way to start "R" week.

Next, I had been saving interesting looking boxes and bottle caps for months. It was finally time to put my plan into effect. Look at what we made!

This is Recycle Robbie and his dog, Rover! The students loved it. The only problem was glue. I had to find some glue that would hold the plastic bottle caps. Luckily for me, my best buddy at school had some "Aileen's Tacky Glue" and it worked like a charm.